The essay assumes humans remain useful because they can close doors, retrieve burritos, and verify reality.
I suspect our deeper value may be that we create meaning. A personal AI becomes valuable because a person invests decades of memory and identity into it.
The disturbing possibility is that future systems may need humans not for labor but for significance. We become the source of the meaning that gives the machine a reason to exist.
There's a transnational genre of literature especially Chinese on the life of delivery gig workers. Truly it is the global modal subject-position of our time in the same way Chaplin's factory antics were in the 30s. Almost the entire concept of seeing the world as discreet "tasks"/prompts asking the machine and mechanised humans, is itself a mode of being that totally overturns the older concept of the Fordist assembly line, the just-in-time/Japanese small batch postfordist manufacturing model, and even the "email job" of 1995-2022. This piece is good and correctly recognises that the rise of AI and automated workflows are a human story and vice-versa
This text is quite ambivalent, but we are still talking about AI rooted in contemporary capitalism and the expansion of its tendencies. The question arises, what would be the symbiosis of AI with other systems. And maybe capitalism is an inevitable uroboros and the change of the system is inevitable anyway... or is salvation precisely in well-used AI? Salvation or ultimate destruction.
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The essay assumes humans remain useful because they can close doors, retrieve burritos, and verify reality.
I suspect our deeper value may be that we create meaning. A personal AI becomes valuable because a person invests decades of memory and identity into it.
The disturbing possibility is that future systems may need humans not for labor but for significance. We become the source of the meaning that gives the machine a reason to exist.
There's a transnational genre of literature especially Chinese on the life of delivery gig workers. Truly it is the global modal subject-position of our time in the same way Chaplin's factory antics were in the 30s. Almost the entire concept of seeing the world as discreet "tasks"/prompts asking the machine and mechanised humans, is itself a mode of being that totally overturns the older concept of the Fordist assembly line, the just-in-time/Japanese small batch postfordist manufacturing model, and even the "email job" of 1995-2022. This piece is good and correctly recognises that the rise of AI and automated workflows are a human story and vice-versa
This text is quite ambivalent, but we are still talking about AI rooted in contemporary capitalism and the expansion of its tendencies. The question arises, what would be the symbiosis of AI with other systems. And maybe capitalism is an inevitable uroboros and the change of the system is inevitable anyway... or is salvation precisely in well-used AI? Salvation or ultimate destruction.